(Updated December 19, 2018)

Since its founding in 2002, Interactions LLC (then Interactions Corporation) has steadily expanded its Intelligent Virtual Assistant offerings with technologies that improve human-to-machine conversations. As it prepares to enter 2019, the announcement of its partnership with Next Caller formalizes the layered approach it is taking to strengthen the security of conversations conducted through its IVA. “We’ve always recommended a layered approach to security,” explained Mary McKenna, Director of Product Management at Interactions, adding that they “could already do knowledge-, device- and voice biometrics-based authentication.”

Interactions also offered another layer of security enabled by an “ANI blacklist”, meaning a database of the telephone numbers of known fraudsters, compiled by Interactions clients for their IVA services. The new partnership with Next Caller goes beyond a simple database look-up by including VeriCall(TM), which is an API-based service that captures an incoming phone number and returns a lightening fast score of the risk associated with that number. “It is not a flag; it’s a score” explained McKenna. Thus it enables brands to set thresholds for accepting or rejecting callers based, not just on risk, but also on other business criteria.

Continuing to Layer it On

The company took a quantum leap forward in 2014 by acquiring the intellectual property and much of the personnel that developed speech processing technologies at AT&T under the name AT&T Watson. By 2016 the companies had successfully bonded and offered the unified suite of services under the Curo brand. That single platform included a stack of technologies that includes Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Dialog Management, and Voice Biometrics. These, in turn are designed to support conversations carried out in voice or text over multiple channels or platforms.

But the Voice Channel and IVR is where the new partnership will have the most impact. Financial institutions are about to be joined by large retailers business process outsourcers as they tighten up anti-fraud tactics in large contact centers. Their demands have inspired the likes of Verizon Business to team up with Pindrop, Neustar to purchase TrustID and Nuance to add ConversationalPrint(TM) to its Customer Engagement Platform.

Interactions and its rivals are addressing demands from large enterprises that support omni-channel engagement models with customers and prospects, but realize that the voice channel could be the weakest link in their security chain. Layered solutions take advantage of Deep Neural Networking and cloud-based resources to speed up the authentication processes without sacrificing security.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles